What does a shop set up on the day its portal opens under its own name?

A workshop that has tuned cars for years decides to take files online. The owner has a name people know locally, a logo on the van, a Facebook page with a few thousand followers, and two kinds of customer: car owners who find the shop at night, and a handful of garages who send work every week. On Friday the portal is ready. On Saturday morning the owner wants to post the link.

What happens between those two moments decides what the first visitor sees. A portal that still says the standard lines, in the standard colours, with a help page about a typical file service, works. It just is not yet the shop. This is the walk through the six parts of the portal that turn it into one, with a link to the page that describes each in full.

Where does the owner start?

With the setup wizard, which a new portal opens first. It asks where you work, your brand, whether you are alone or with tuners, what you use, how customers pay, and about messages and support. Skip what you are not sure of; it picks up where you stopped.

Then comes Settings, one page with a search at the top. A portal has hundreds of settings, grouped into areas that follow the portal itself: Brand and look, Customers and prices, Requests and files, Tuners and staff, and so on. Most owners stop using the areas after the first week and use the search. It reads each setting's label, its other names and its help line, so "logo", "closing days" or "fee" find what you mean, and one typo is forgiven.

One section deserves five minutes before anything else: Country and language, in System. The time zone is the one clock the portal works to. The business country chooses the tax rules the portal applies. The default language is what the portal speaks before a person has chosen one, the sign-in page included. The settings page says to do it before the first invoice and the first booking, and launch day is before both.

Whose portal is it?

A customer never asks this out loud, but every page answers it. The brand page covers seven sections under Brand and look, and on launch day four of them do most of the work.

Name, logo and business details. The portal name is the name customers know you by, the brand rather than the legal company. It is in the browser tab, beside the logo in the sidebar, on the sign-in page and under the sign-off of every email. The legal company name is separate, and it heads every invoice. Upload two logos, one for dark backgrounds and one for light, and the browser tab icon. Then open a page in dark mode and in light mode and check a logo shows in each. The logos you upload once are picked up by the footer, the emails, the certificates and the quotes.

Theme and colours. Choose the theme first, then the colours. The page gives one piece of advice worth repeating: if you set one colour, set the main colour. On dark pages it is every button, link and active mark, and it is the emails' accent until you give them one. The portal works out the text on your buttons, so you only choose the colour.

Footer. The about text, the social links, the payment icons, the logo. The owner pastes the address of the Facebook page that will carry tomorrow's post.

How your emails look. The sign-off and the footer line. Then the step people skip: send yourself a test from any job and read it on a phone, in a dark mail app too.

The opening hours belong here as well. With Use opening hours on, the footer shows whether tuners are online or when you open next.

Two things the brand settings do not do, and the page says so. They do not remove the small "powered by" link, and they do not put the portal on your own domain. Those are the white label and own domain add-ons. The name, the logos and the email look come with every package; the colours, the background picture, the menu, the banner and the footer start from Solo.

What does a stranger see at the door?

Tomorrow's Facebook post leads to one page: the sign-in page. To a customer with an account it is a form. To somebody who followed a link it is the only page of the shop they can see. The sign-in page has two halves for that reason: a panel about your service and the form beside it.

The owner works down the panel. The tagline beside the logo. A two-line headline and the sentence under it, which says what a visitor can send and what they get back. Three highlights. Six offers, each with an icon, a title and a line. Three steps that explain the service in the shortest way there is. Up to two links.

None of it needs a designer, and none of it has to be done today. Every text field left empty shows a standard line, translated into the language the visitor reads. Type your own and it shows exactly as typed, in every language. So the rule for launch day is simple: rewrite the lines that are about you, and leave the ones the standard already says well.

One block answers the question every visitor has. Prices on the sign-in page shows what a file costs from your own settings. Nothing is typed, so the door changes when your prices do.

A portal for dealers who already know you can drop the selling half entirely with Plain sign-in page. Our shop takes new customers from the public, so it keeps the panel.

Then the lock on the door, under Security:

• Two-step sign-in for your team makes a second step a condition of working in the admin side.
• Cloudflare Turnstile check asks each visitor to pass a small person check before a form is accepted, with the keys of your own widget. The forgotten-password page is the one bots like best, because every address they try sends an email in your name.
• Sign in with Google puts the button on the sign-in and sign-up pages, under an app in your own Google Cloud console.

The switches that need keys from outside come on only after a live test has passed with those keys, so a typing mistake never locks anyone out.

The last step costs nothing: open the sign-in page in a private window, on a phone as well as a desktop, and read it as a stranger would.

Who gets in, and how fast?

Here the shop's two kinds of customer pull in different directions. A car owner who finds the portal tonight should be able to register, upload a read and pay before they lose interest. The trade prices are for garages the owner knows. The customer accounts page is where that is decided, by a few switches rather than by somebody watching the inbox.

• Approve new customers makes a new account but keeps it closed until you approve it from Users. The customer is told the account awaits approval, and you get an email about each sign-up. It comes with Pro and above.
• Phone number required is for a shop that rings its customers.
• Business customers only adds a required box with your wording beside it. The moment of the tick and the exact sentence agreed to are stored. It records what the customer ticked; it does not check a company register.
• Ask how they found you adds the question to the form, optional for the customer.

Our shop opens to car owners, so approval stays off and the form asks how people found the shop. That last answer is counted on the Where they come from tab of Client Sign-ups, where the owner can also make a link per campaign. Tomorrow's post gets its own link, and in a month the page shows the visits, the accounts and the files it brought.

Before the first sign-up, the legal pages. The portal carries a terms page, a privacy page and a page for what you do when a file does not write to the car, each with a tab per language. Write them in your words, or paste the link to the ones on your own website, with Terms page link for instance. The portal gives you the pages. It does not write your terms for you, and its built-in texts are a starting point, not legal advice for your country.

What answers the questions that arrive tonight?

The first week of a portal is the same five questions, again and again. How long does a file take. Can I pay by transfer. What do I send for a gearbox. Do you keep my original. The help page is where they are answered once: five topics down the side, a search box, questions that open with a click. It is open to anyone who reaches the portal, signed in or not, and it wears your brand.

The page is never empty. A new portal shows a standard set of questions in every topic. That is also its weakness on launch day: until you write your own, it describes a typical file service, not your shop.

So the owner does one topic, not five. Switch on Your own FAQ; nothing changes yet. Open the topic the messages will come from, usually Credits and payments, press Load Defaults, correct the answers, remove what does not apply, add your own, and save. That topic now shows the shop's words; the other four keep the standard ones. Set the Get started link to where a new customer should begin.

From then on, when a customer asks one of those questions, the owner sends the address of the page instead of typing the answer again. Writing your own questions comes with Solo and above.

What does the owner pay for, and change later?

Launch day is also the day the owner learns where the portal's own bill lives. Plan and billing is the page where the package, the add-ons, the staff and dealer seats and the room for files are set, and My account is the door to the card and the invoices.

It has one rule, written at its head. What you switch on is paid today, for the rest of the month, and billed from the next first. What you lower or take off stays until the end of the month. Nothing is charged on a switch: the page first says what the change would cost, in words, and only then offers the button that pays.

That matters on launch day for a plain reason. The shop does not have to guess its size in advance. When a second tuner joins in spring, the owner adds a seat on that page and the change applies at once. Both pages open for the owner alone.

What will launch day not do for you?

Some of it is honest work that no setting replaces.

• The sign-in panel holds six offers, three highlights, three steps and two links, no more. A longer story belongs on a page of your own that a link points to.
• The help page is text only, in five fixed topics, in the one language you wrote your answers in.
• The portal works to one time zone, the shop's. A customer in another country sees your time.
• A line you type yourself is not translated. Only the standard lines are.

On Saturday morning the owner posts the campaign link. The page it opens has the shop's name in the tab, its logo over the form, its own sentence about what it tunes, and a help page that already knows how the shop takes payment. The visitor does not know any of this was set up yesterday, and they should not have to.